Too much energy is spent putting writing in boxes, I think anyway.

Writing is a reflection of deeper reality, of that which is everywhere and in everything, and you only need to bite off the piece sufficient unto the day.

...contrary to every book cover, promoting the story of the pages within as if it were a cure for a toothache and bad skin.  The cover promises certain standards, approved as a capable handling of a certain form without ambiguity.  (Because the book is seen as a product, bringing in money, the system of book reviewing also is a money making proposition, and the two feed off each other, enabling.)  "Joe" will travel, there will be tension, the reader's eye will want to follow the conflict, in the end a point will be revealed.

But that's not how life works.  Life is shifting sands ever shifting, changing minds, confusion, nature, never still for a moment, always in flux, like being water in a river, something somewhere in this universe we have collectively dreamed up from being living stardust, a bunch of atoms stuck together in  physical space.

Religious tales are at least an attempt at 'here is what we are, here is what this is all about,' though necessarily they are primitive and rely on magic tricks often enough, as if they felt a subconscious need to say 'wake up,' like a teacher in a post-lunch classroom on a hot day.  There is no real plot to religious stories.  Because they are truer to life they provide a gentle resting place for the mind, just as great poetry can do, asking as much as answering, summoning faith, as in Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody!  Who are you?"

These stories are quiet, a Buddha posing, Madonna holding her child, a man spread on a cross revealing his deeper nature and glory, apostles with Jesus on a boat, a saint receiving a vision, like Eustace.  They are snapshots, revelations unto themselves, clean and pure, of the kinds of things we remember.

But to make too much out of a plot and the craft behind it objectifies 'the story' as if it were a desirable martini cocktail, a product based on 'what happens to so&so,' as the reader is manipulated into caring... when of course just by our nature caring (unless we are corrupted).  We all have power over words, even the purported 'dumbest,' 'the least of these.'  We can all take an image and run with it, inhabiting otherness.

A person looking down at a stream, that is enough for a story.

Writers far more clever and industrious than I tell stories, the kind that sell, pages of imaginative detail, entire operas...  the accepted form from out of the history of story written down.

But one should also recognize humility, that outer happenstances are of less importance, that a story should not call attention as much to the self, but to The Self we all, more or less, share.

Why pump my image out there, as if it meant more or was better, more beautiful than anyone else's?

We want, in the end, ourselves to be real--the great meditative impulse behind forms of expression.

Manifested, we go out into the world, to realize that we are ever returning.  When we tell a story about Job or Jonah or a prophet who speaks in parables about lost sheep and prodigal sons or read about the life of St. Francis we are engaged in the return, the return to being, 'thou art that which is.'

Stories cannot but help do that.



I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260)


by Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!


The poem speaks of people's brilliance.  Of course, they are.  You can explicate truth as a college senior, not that you'll necessarily get a good grade from it or the perfect entree to a job.  (Why I believe in and stand by A Hero For Our Time.)  But no one recognizes it, or pays you for it, even though your utterance might deserve place in a fine museum.

Time, a function of the Universe, will tell, of course.

25 years spent in humility, I don't know, would that be warranted?  I don't know, maybe a token of distractedness just as much.  Maybe egotistical in its own way, too much thought put into it, too much nervous energy, when really, you just need to lean back and look up at the stars.